Salesforce jumps on the artificial intelligence bandwagon with a surprise acquisition

Salesforce acquired a smart calendar app called Tempo on Friday,
joining the artificial intelligence space every big tech company
seems to be competing for these days.

Tempo's a calendar app that uses machine learning and artificial
intelligence to make personal scheduling easier. By integrating
with email, social media, or web databases, it can automatically
look up relevant data of your scheduled meetings.

For example, it can pull up the address of your meeting or
the weather ahead of your appointment, serving as a Google
Now-type assistant. It can also look through your previous
meetings and suggest additional relevant attendees.

It's also worth noting Tempo was incubated by SRI
International, the agency that created Apple's Siri
software.

Tempo announced the deal through
its website, saying the acquisition will "give us the
opportunity to continue our mission at a much larger
scale."

The exact terms of the deal were not disclosed. Tempo will shut
down its service at the end of next month.

It's unclear at this point how exactly Salesforce will
incorporate Tempo's technology into its CRM software. Salesforce
has been making a huge push towards data analytics, with its Wave
Analytics Platform released last year, and having this kind of
insight would help Salesforce customers, who are mostly
salespeople or marketers, to gain better insight into their daily
schedules. One of its big acquisitions last year, RelateIQ, was
also in the predictive analytics space.

Artifical intelligence has been a popular area in tech lately.
Aside from Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, Google made a
big announcement around its
Google Now platform this week, including the "Now on Tap"
function which provides relevant information instantly on your
smartphone.

We'll get to learn more about it at Dreamforce, Salesforce big
annual conference, starting on September 15.